


Moment Calculation

by Tieleen



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 02:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tieleen/pseuds/Tieleen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I didn't use the 'underage' warning, since it seemed general enough to be misleading here, but the story contains mostly-offscreen sexual activity between a 17 year old and a 19 year old.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Moment Calculation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Penknife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/gifts).



> I didn't use the 'underage' warning, since it seemed general enough to be misleading here, but the story contains mostly-offscreen sexual activity between a 17 year old and a 19 year old.

It is 1981, and Tony Stark won't be able to buy a girl a drink in this bar for another five years. The girl across the room is somehow still smiling at him, though, exactly as if he won't be finished with everything including his doctorate and out of here before that ever happens. Rhodey's pretty sure she's at least twenty. It's like magic.

"Nine thousand," Tony is saying to the bartender, sliding one more bill into the pile, because another one of Tony's magic tricks is that he never knows when enough is enough. "Nine thousand twenty? Come on, brother, you're killing me."

"Please don't call the man 'brother'," Rhodey says, giving the bartender a pained look. 

The bartender gives him a blank face back. He's been blank since Tony slapped the first five hundred on the counter; Rhodey isn't sure whether Tony honestly doesn't get that the guy now thinks he's being set up and isn't going to budge no matter how high the numbers go, or if he's running some sort of experiment to see how much further he'll have to push before his money counts more than the suspicion of immediate criminal charges.

Or maybe he's just having fun with this. It's hard to tell, with Tony.

"Just a rum and coke," Tony says cajolingly. "Maybe one of those weird margaritas. Come on, look at her. She's not going to want anything strong. This is barely alcohol we're talking about."

Or maybe, Rhodey thinks, he's just so fascinated by this idea of not getting what he wants that he really just can't help himself from keeping on poking at it. Maybe that's what it is.

"Tony," he says, "why can't you have a fake ID like everybody else?"

"Who's everybody else?" Tony says. "You don't have a fake ID."

"I'm going to be air force," Rhodey says. "I am not the role model you're looking for here."

"I thought you said I needed to learn from you and, okay, no, I can't remember what came after that," Tony says. "You sounded pretty sure, though."

It's the third week of the spring semester of Rhodey's sophomore year at MIT, and Tony Stark, who got there a year ahead of him, would already be done with his B.Sc. and on to his Master's, except he apparently can't be assed to finish three mandatory projects and one paper because he's too busy trying to teach his robot to fetch.

"Yes, all right," Rhodey says. "You do need to learn from me, you need to stop fucking around and design something that'll blow Dr. Linder's mind so he'll forget you're four months late handing it in. But you've also been needing to learn from me and get to class every once in a while for months now, and I didn't notice that really happening, so I'll settle for you acting like a normal person and not trying to buy out the bar."

"Buy the bar!" Tony says. "I didn't think about that."

"Yes, you did," Rhodey says. "I'm going to go shoot some pool. Are you coming or staying here to harass the bartender?"

"You're such a positive influence, Rhodey," Tony says, looking the bartender up and down assessingly again. "It's disgusting."

"Yeah, okay," Rhodey says. "I'll be over there."

**

Tony, Rhodey will learn fast and know for years to come, is in fact fascinated with things he can't have, with the promise of challenge that usually turns out to be nothing but a minor bump in the road to whatever he's decided he needs. Tony chips at walls and aims wrecking balls at stop signs, ducks around locked doors and cajoles the facts of the world into rearranging themselves in his favor. Tony is richer than anybody else around and smarter than a good number of them put together, and he has whatever makes up buckets and buckets of personal charm in a guy most people want to drop-kick off a building sooner or later. He doesn't really understand the possibility of things turning out against him; he's amazed and a little thrilled, behind the bitching, whenever they do. There's nothing that catches Tony Stark's attention faster than something he can't have.

Rhodey doesn't know if it's unfortunate or very, very fortunate, but he'll apparently never be one of these things, for all that he never planned for the question to even come up in the first place.

Thirty years later it'll occur to him that he got to keep Tony anyway, that somehow it was never even a question, except for those times when Tony went too far on something and Rhodey made it one. It will occur to him that this is a little surprising.

**

"Seriously," Rhodey says, unloading Tony's arm from around his shoulders and propping him up against a wall, "you spent half an hour trying to get the bartender to let you have a margarita when you had a flask of scotch in your jacket the whole time. This isn't even surprising."

Somewhere in his backpack is his key to Tony's building – the service door that doesn't go through the doorman at the front, a man Tony probably hasn't seen since the day he moved in – but it's hiding out of reach somewhere, inviting him to take a bet on whether he's going to find it before Tony gets bored and decides to topple over.

"I couldn't offer her a drink from my pocket, Rhodes," Tony says, plastered back against the wall and watching with interest. "That is not how you treat a woman."

"Woman," Rhodey snorts. "You're sixteen. Tell me how much you know about women."

"Oh, is it Rhodey is Older and Wiser time already?" Tony mimes checking his watch. "I thought that was half an hour from now."

"No, it's Rhodey Thinks You're Full of Shit time," Rhodey says, giving up on the search. "It's always that time. Give me your keys."

Tony looks at him inquiringly.

"You can't _possibly_ be that drunk," Rhodey says. "I was with you the whole time."

Tony smiles at him, beautifully, thoroughly unhelpful, guileless and trusting, and Rhodey is immediately on his guard.

"What," he says, taking a wary half-step back.

Tony looks at him. Then he rolls his eyes and drags himself to standing up, one elbow still against the wall, the other digging into his jeans pocket.

"I don't know why people can't just get with the program," he says, sounding a hell of a lot less slurred than he did a second ago. "Come on."

He unlocks the door while Rhodey is still gaping at him, then has the nerve to give him an impatient look when Rhodey doesn't budge. Of course he has the nerve; Tony _can't_ see why anyone would fail to get with the program, and he also can't ever imagine why the program would be run by anyone but him. Rhodey's known him for months now, he knows this already. 

This is a completely new program, though, whatever it is, and he's not at all sure how he feels about it.

"Come _on_ ," Tony says again, tugging him by the wrist down the corridor and into the elevator, and Rhodey follows, still trying to calculate trajectories and figure out the game plan, even though he knows, he _knows_ , the way to deal with Tony is never to try to outthink him.

He's had two slugs out of that damn flask on the way here, probably not enough to impair his judgment any, except Tony generally impairs his judgment pretty well all by himself, if Rhodey's record of giving in to stupid plans is anything to go by. So whatever's going on here is –

Then Tony Stark is kissing him in an elevator, and Rhodey kisses him back because what the hell is going on.

Which is an awesome reason, really. Except, he thinks, as Tony drags a hand up his arm and bites his lip just a little too hard, except that Tony obviously either didn't have as many slugs from that flask as he's been pretending to or he can hold his liquor even better than Rhodey thought but who even knows what that means, except that Tony is two years younger than he is and fantastically fucked up in more ways than MIT has taught Rhodey to count so far, except Tony has clearly kissed enough people to know what he's doing but Rhodey's only half convinced Tony ever knows what he's doing, at any point, especially those times when he's clearly holding all the cards.

This is turning out to feel a lot like one of those times. That is not reassuring.

"Tony," he says, pulling back as gently as he can and bringing up a firm hand to keep Tony back when he tries to move in again, "Look –"

The elevator dings and Tony beams at him, an even more disconcerting expression glimpsed from this close up. 

"Yes, excellent timing," he says, and Rhodey falls back a step in sheer self-preservation and ends up being propelled further back as the doors slide open, one step out and three more until his back is almost against Tony's door and Tony is crowding closer in the tiny space his apartment leaves for the stairwell.

"Okay," Rhodey says, "this is not a good idea, and we're not doing it."

Tony gives him an incredulous look, like this objection is the most unexpectedly ridiculous thing he's heard all day. "Why not?"

"Oh, let me count the ways," Rhodey says, leaning back and trying to get both his brain and his breathing straight. 

The elevator doors slide shut again, leaving them both in near-darkness. He tries to pretend the last thing he saw wasn't Tony's eyes on his mouth.

"You think I'm hot," Tony says, as if that's a given. 

Which is wrong, actually; Rhodey is peripherally aware that Tony's attractive, the way he's been peripherally aware of it in a lot of other people before. But the operative word, he thinks, was peripherally – a bad operative word, because Tony is excellent at directing people's focus where he wants it to go. 

"I think I'm going home," Rhodey says. "You're obviously okay here, so –"

There was that moment downstairs when Tony shifted out of whatever he was doing and into this new game, and there's this moment now, where Tony shifts back a little, not a step but somehow further away and more familiar and _safer_ all the same, and huffs a little, and says, "Would it really kill you not to argue about _everything_? Let me open the door."

**

There are a lot of things Rhodey knows about Tony, the way you get to know things about people over a lot of years: things learned when you're seeing each other at least twice a week and arguing over the basic laws of physics and mocking each other's ideas about what passable design means, things learned while you're talking on the phone once a month and getting together maybe every six while the world is changing around you, things learned while you're drifting further away and more deeply into each other's orbits by turns over a decade, two, more.

He got Tony figured out by the time they knew each other for half a semester, and it never really turns out he was wrong, but he still always ends up surprised. 

And it's like one of those the-abyss-looks-back things, because Tony is pretty amazing at figuring people out; Rhodey has no doubt Tony had him laid out and dissected a lot more quickly than it happened the other way around. But Tony's still always surprised, half for show and half in secret reality, because at some point Rhodey apparently ended up meriting more understanding than just the knowledge of how to push him so he'll jump the right way. Tony was never very good at that part at sixteen, and Rhodey isn't too sure he ever got any better over the years.

**

It is 1982, and Rhodey just aced his Topics in Thermodynamics final and got back some very promising feedback about the progress of his independent study. He thinks he's allowed the glow of good news and good cheer to push him just a little too far.

"I am _having sex with a minor_ ," he says. "This is _not okay_."

"This is barely sex," Tony says. "This is like – just lie back and stop worrying about it, all right, I know what I'm doing."

"You _never_ know what you're doing," Rhodey says. It's possible his voice sounds a little hysterical. "Hands off. Hands _off_. You don't need to be touching any of my private parts right now."

"Okay," Tony says easily, hands raised up in the air a little, the left hovering just above Rhodey's dick. "Can I touch them later? Do you seriously call them your private parts? That's a little weird."

"That is _not_ the weird thing about this situation," Rhodey says, swiping his hand in the air to get Tony as far away from the danger zone as humanly possible. They end up palm to palm, fingers curled a little against each other; Rhodey wraps his thumb around the back of Tony's hand to keep him in place and refuses to be distracted.

"That's really going to be the weird part about any situation," Tony says. "Think about it. This was really pretty middle of the road until you brought that up."

He's not looking at where their hands are touching, but Rhodey can tell he's acutely aware of it, his arm suddenly still and unnatural between their bodies.

Rhodey releases a breath and rolls his eyes. "Yeah," he says, working his fingers in between Tony's just for the way Tony's face tries to freeze before he recalibrates. "I'm being felt up by someone who can't handle holding hands. Nothing weird about this at all."

"I've held hands with plenty of people," Tony says. The palm against Rhodey's is relaxing, inch by inch, but Rhodey doesn't let himself enjoy it. "Okay, no, I don't actually know that many people who want to hold hands. Are you secretly an eight year old?"

"And you didn't even call me a girl," Rhodey says, deliberately smoothing his thumb up and down the back of Tony's hand and daring him to twitch. "I'm impressed."

"See what motivation can do to a guy," Tony says, still refusing to look down at where he's valiantly trying not to lose at contact chicken. His arm is now an almost perfect facsimile of a real person's, his fingers even exerting just a bit of pressure back.

"If you're about to suggest some kind of system where I sleep with you and you pay me back by actually going to your lab," Rhodey says, "I think you're overestimating how dedicated I am to your… to pretty much your everything."

"It'd be a moral victory, Rhodey," Tony says. He smiles, and Rhodey realizes he's been a little too focused on this hand thing when he discovers the other hand sliding down his side. "Think how proud MIT would be of you managing to teach me about work ethic."

"I'm not sure prostitution counts as a moral victory," Rhodey says.

Tony grins down at him. "This is really more like trading favors."

"I'll just go ahead and repeat myself," Rhodey says, his unoccupied hand now around Tony's wrist but somehow not really holding it in place, "you being a millionaire _plus_ a doctorate, not actually that much of a favor to me. I'm willing to deal with worrying about you ending up unemployed."

"All right," Tony says, his grin sharpening a little, and Rhodey feels his hand move again – his thumb, smoothing slowly up and down Rhodey's ribcage. "Let's renegotiate that deal, then."

"This," Rhodey says, as Tony leans down to lick his neck, half-braced on their still-clasped hands, "is a really bad idea."

"Yeah," Tony says, warm against his throat. "You should really be used to that by now."

**

Rhodey meets Tony Stark in that time where they're all, the two of them and everyone around them, slowly learning how to survive away from home, living on their own. Rhodey learns how to make seven kinds of spaghetti sauce and five dishes made mostly of rice, how to minimize his groceries and maximize his sandwiches, and how to incorporate at least two kinds of vegetables into his diet a day, because he's not very good at lying to his mother. Tony learns that when you choose not to have any hired help come into your home if you can help it, places that deliver are worth their price in gold, and will, when you pay them accordingly, be willing to deliver far later and farther than they claim to.

Rhodey really only ever sees Tony make one kind of meal, even in those days long before technology allows him to have all the food he wants without calling out or letting anyone in: some weird pancake hybrid he learned from an old cook at his parents'. Rhodey has met enough of Tony's one night stands to know that half the time he skips out in the morning, off to some new idea or some more-interesting project. But the other half of the time, even at seventeen, Tony Stark is a charming fucker, and that apparently includes morning-after breakfast. 

It never really tastes like real pancakes, but whenever Rhodey eats the normal version they taste a bit like bad ideas that somehow pan out okay in the end. He chooses not to focus on the part where he's apparently one more person who needs to be charmed. They're not bad, all in all, and really he's used to that part by then, too.

**

By his senior year, Rhodey figures his record is impressive enough that he can go for some easy-A classes that don't have anything to do with his field. He reaches this conclusion mostly by comparing his record to those of people who aren't Tony.

"It's just, if you need any help," Matt says. He grins at Rhodey and then glances down at the textbooks on the table, not quite able to maintain eye contact. "It's pretty amazing you can keep up with this without any biology background. I mean, I know the prerequisites are only basic courses, but they're really lying when they say that's all you need."

"Oh, hey, yeah, I'd really appreciate that," Rhodey says. Matt's little half-smile is his favorite thing about this course, easily outweighing the fact that Matt also has terrible, terrible timing. 

Anyway, the problem is really more that Rhodey has terrible taste in friends.

"On the other hand, it's not like he really needs help," Tony says. He's kicked back in his chair, about two minutes away from putting his feet on the library table. "I mean, it's bio. Not exactly –"

"Tony," Rhodey says, not bothering to look away from Matt since no kind of look he's discovered so far is enough to give Tony pause, "got a D in biology 101. He's still a little bitter."

"I aced biology 101," Tony says, indignant.

Matt looks a little dubious, which is absolutely fine with Rhodey.

"Want to get coffee later, maybe?" he asks. "We could go over the homework for next week."

Matt's smile comes back full-force, his attention off Tony completely. Also, not running away. "Yeah, we can do that. I have to finish some stuff here first, but -?"

"Let me know when you want to go," Rhodey says, letting his smile widen in return. "We're just messing with some details, we can stop any time."

They possibly stay there smiling at each other a beat longer than strictly necessary, but Rhodey remembers himself in time to look away and let Matt head back to his own table before Tony can open his mouth again.

" _Some details,_ " Tony says, disgusted. "Are you seriously going to run off and do _life sciences_ while I have to finish this alone, because –"

"You still remember it's your project, right?" Rhodey says.

"I wouldn't call it a project," Tony says. "I'd call it 'here, you want a doctorate, go do some bullshit work for the glory of the nation.'"

"Exactly, so you're more than able to finish it yourself."

"Rhodey," Tony whines, "I can't believe you're going to abandon me with this crap just to try to get into some dork's pants."

"You tried to do exactly that to me two weeks ago," Rhodey says. "It was your work then, too."

"That was completely different," Tony says. "They were physicists. Okay, theoretical physicists, but still. Also, a lot better looking than this guy."

"Okay, no," Rhodey says firmly. "This is _not_ a thing we're doing."

Tony gives him a wounded look. It's only maybe a third overtly put-on, which means Tony is actually trying to con him, even if it's half-assed - not Rhodey's favorite Stark mode by any means. He contemplates just walking up to Matt and suggesting he can finish his reading another day.

"How is that nice?" Tony says. "I'm just trying to look out for you."

"Really," Rhodey says. Across the library, Matt looks up from his textbook pile and catches his eye.

"Yeah," Tony says. Matt ducks his head; Rhodey would really like to know if he's blushing. It seems like pretty good odds. His own nape is a little warm under his collar. "I'm worried about your life choices."

"My life choices," Rhodey says, pulling his gaze back from Matt to stare at Tony with the full skeptical irony this sentence deserves, and Tony cracks under the scrutiny and grins. 

"Yeah," he says, and now the indignation is completely and unapologetically fake, and Rhodey allows the corners of his mouth to twitch up just a little. "I hear you let people talk you into all kinds of bad ideas."

"Somehow, I don't think Matt's going to try to convince me to rappel off the physics building in the middle of the night," Rhodey tells him. "He just doesn't seem like the type."

"Oh, come on," Tony says. "If you're going to go over my track record, at least have the decency to hit the highlights. I have no idea what I was thinking."

"Far as I remember, you were thinking you spent three days locked inside a lab instead of sleeping, and you were pretty much off your head on vending machine grease," Rhodey says. "But it's entirely possible you were just trying to get me to crash-test something without telling me."

"No, I'd choose the civil engineering building then," Tony says. "Much shorter fall."

"And on that cheery note," Rhodey says, watching Matt pile up his books, half-covertly looking back at them as he picks up his bag, "I think this is my stop."

"Couldn't you at least go for someone from an actual science," Tony says, but Rhodey ignores him as he shoulders his own backpack, striding over while Matt looks down at the table and smiles.

**

In 1985, Tony convinces Rhodey to go to Vegas for a what he calls a pre-21-practice weekend, to join him on a very experimental SI plane – something he failed at talking Rhodey into two years ago, but now the reports show 20% improvement on the safety margins – and to be late to two different meetings on his new base. The last fact is what bothers him the most, although he tries to take comfort in the fact that those meetings were eight months apart from each other.

In 1985 Rhodey has sex with Tony three times; it's been years since the alarm button about that has been more than a vague background noise. There's a fourth time where they somehow end up halfway to it in Tony's workshop, on the highly uncomfortable cot he keeps there, until Rhodey draws back to take a breath and finds himself saying, "I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be in a board meeting right now."

"Fuck the board," Tony mumbles into his neck. "Let me tell you how much nobody cares if I come to meetings or not."

"Aren't you supposed to learn all about ruling the empire?" Rhodey says. "At some point your old man's probably going to start docking your pay."

Tony snorts. "My old man isn't getting off the wheel until he hits ninety nine," he says. "I'm not actually sure he's quit hoping he'll have another kid to put there by then."

"There you go," Rhodey says, leaning back so he can do up his fly. "Gotta get a head start on the competition."

Tony huffs, a little annoyed, but he's looking around for his shirt. "Since when do you care about board meetings? Oh – hold on, never mind, did I show you this thing I've been working on –"

"No, but you showed me the nine versions that came before that, so the chances of me feeding your ego right now aren't great," Rhodey says. "Why the hell is there a screwdriver in your ceiling?"

"Prototype number five fought back," Tony says. "Okay, what – yeah, I need to borrow your belt."

"This is my favorite belt," Rhodey says. Tony's track record at returning things is, basically, zero.

"No, it isn't," Tony says, either a bluff of one of his bizarre attention-to-detail moments. "I don't have time to buy one, Rhodey, it's either that or sweatpants to a board meeting."

"Last year you showed up to a staff meeting in fishnet stockings," Rhodey says. "And the reason I know that is that you still have the picture on your desk."

"I have great legs," Tony says. "And there was a Halloween party, I didn't have time to change. A lot like right now. I bet it could've been avoided if someone loaned me a belt then."

In 1985, Tony also talks Rhodey into giving him his belt, even though Rhodey knows perfectly well he'll never see it again.

In 1985, Rhodey convinces Tony to work on his clunker of a car, convinces him to stop working on his no-longer-clunker of a car before it starts talking back or something, convinces him not to steal his father's private jet so he can get Rhodey to his new posting, and refuses to be talked into any number of things he doesn't bother to keep track of.

He remembers that time in the workshop, though, because Tony left with his belt and with the careless suggestion that Rhodey get something to eat if there was any food in the house, and Rhodey'd laid back on the uncomfortable cot and stared at the screwdriver and realized it'd been years since he last tried to get Tony to keep his appointments or anything like that. He also realized he'd gone so much to the 'Tony's business' side that he'd been either personally responsible or accomplice more than once, and that the faint stirring of unease as Tony was biting his shoulder was mostly just the slow surfacing of the fact that four times in one year was almost like forming a habit.

**

In 1986, Tony stares straight ahead and ignores both Rhodey's presence behind him and Obadiah Stane's hand on his shoulder. His face is blank behind the sunglasses. The minister drones on about his parents' contributions to the community.

**

Rhodey never meets Maria Stark, although he has some vague picture of her in his head, from things Tony's said here and there. Someone serious, and far away, but willing to be charmed into a smile, someone whose attention could be purchased if you worked hard enough.

He meets Howard Stark once, and Obadiah Stane a handful of times, back in those MIT days. Years later, of course, he ends up seeing Stane almost more often than he sees Tony. The military prefers to work with Stane, a man who reliably chooses profit over whim and who keeps his promised schedules without having to be babysat through it. The military has full appreciation for Tony's genius, for his ability to provide the impossible, but it prefers him in his workshop, working up miracles and hopefully not getting distracted by the fact that he's still working on the basic training of the same damn robot.

Rhodey has always been in full accord with all of this, really, because those are all fair and obvious points. And he doesn't have anything against Stane; the man is always jovial, it's practically his middle name. He's a good business man, and a shrewd thinker, and Rhodey had decided years before - sitting in a string of restaurants around Boston and watching Tony's almost-unguarded face - that the fact that Stane's joviality clearly says Rhodey is something like a poor third cousin hoping for expensive hand-me-downs, that isn't really all that important.

Howard Stark is… a complicated thing. Rhodey was raised to give respect to his elders, certainly to his friends' parents, and the man is practically a living legend, a war hero of sorts. 

But Starks are always their own category in anything at all, and twenty minutes around Howard and Tony – the Tony who sits at the restaurant table across from Howard, who's both not the guy Rhodey's been friends with for over two years and a hyper-concentrated dose of him – is enough for Rhodey to start rewriting the rules, at least inside his own head.

Then there's the time, not long after that, that Howard essentially tries to buy him for Tony. This is something that Tony will periodically try to do himself over the years, in between bursts of simply trying to give Rhodey things for the hell of it, and it'll always be annoying and often infuriating and sometimes he'll accept for various reasons but still resent it, but it'll never make him as downright angry as it does that time with Howard. 

Tony not getting that Rhodey is there without being bought is the same as Tony trying to get more from Rhodey than Rhodey is willing to give at any particular time: a little offensive, a lot frustrating, more familiar than almost anything Rhodey can think of. Howard doing it, that was different.

Not to mention the fact that he had in no way been ready – been far too new and somehow still idealistic to be ready – to know how well a man like Howard Stark fit into the US military machine, how much his money and his willingness to convert it into power could get him, and how easily. The US military has sold Rhodey to Tony over and over again for thirty years, almost as often as it asked him to sell Tony in some way or another. There'd even been once or twice when Tony had basically bought the US military for him, some relevant part twisted off and repainted and presented for his enjoyment. But that first time, that was different, and he'd never quite forgiven it. Not quite.

**

In 1986, Rhodey fails numerous times at trying to get Tony to talk about how he's doing, fields several drunk phone calls and catches the evidence of other drunk nights in the papers, uses three full days of leave time helping Tony build a new robot that isn't really all that better than the old one, and has pointless but infuriating arguments about that renewal of Star Trek Tony is unaccountably optimistic about.

He gets sick leave for two days, and they try to make the new robot a little better, even though Tony doesn't actually need anyone's help with it. Rhodey convinces him not to add in a slingshot and considers it a job well done.

1987 is quieter. The new Star Trek isn't really that bad.

**

Tony is twenty-five when he has his first relationship – both the first time he spends more than a week sleeping with the same person and the first time he calls it a relationship, as far as Rhodey knows.

Rhodey's leave is about a month after it starts, and he comes to New York to visit Tony before heading home. The girl, Susan, is gorgeous and bright and funny; Rhodey likes her from the first moment. Tony is clearly besotted, and she's just as clearly besotted right back – easy to believe, since he's on his best behavior.

Rhodey sits at a club and watches them dance together, watches her laugh into Tony's shoulder and watches him kiss the side of her head, and realizes something, with enough startling force that he's grateful he didn't tell Tony how long he was staying, that he can leave right away and not have it seem weird.

The thing is, this is the first time he's seen Tony like this, and in a way he supposes he never really imagined Tony _could_ be like this at all. The thing is – somewhere in the back of his head, he was braced for jealousy. He's last slept with Tony over a year ago, they've last been in regular contact two years ago or more, but he was ready for the possibility.

This isn't jealousy, though. This is – he can imagine now, far too easily, in a way it never occurred to him to imagine before, Tony trying to be in love with him. He can imagine him besotted, even; not the way he is with this sparkling stranger, Tony's never been on his best behavior around him. But something like this. He can imagine Tony trying to make it work, he can imagine Tony trying to make it last. He can also imagine Tony's rueful amusement at the fact of failure where they both knew it was coming.

Rhodey has only ever had a so-so record where Tony's stupid plans are concerned. Ten years later, even, it'll seem a bit laughable that he was sitting there staring at a dance floor in a New York club and thinking all of this, but this is 1990 and Rhodey is twenty-seven and he buys himself a plane ticket the very next day.

**Author's Note:**

> I have to admit that, in my head, this story leads to present-day Rhodey/Tony/Pepper OT3. That part is 100% optional, though.


End file.
